Google Panda 4.0 search algorithm update: what entrepreneurs can learn from the winners and losers

You have probably heard about Google’s Panda 4.0 search algorithm update by now. You might even have seen a list of the winners and losers from this update.

eBay received the most attention. The company lost 33 per cent of its organic traffic, according to several rank-trackers. And when big brands are penalised by Google, the search engine optimisation (SEO) community goes berserk and experts begin to speculate why.

However, it turns out that eBay wasn’t hit by the Panda 4 update at all. An anonymous source has revealed that eBay was hit by a manual penalty, which Google released in conjunction to Panda 4. As opposed to algorithmic adjustments like Panda 4, a manual penalty is the result of a human review of the website.

The Panda algorithm in fact would have affected entire domains, not individual pages. If eBay had been hit by Panda, you wouldn’t find their website when you search for “eBay” on Google.

So despite all the expertise of the SEO community, it’s still not clear why eBay was penalised – only Google and eBay know that.

Remember: eBay is a company with a team of some of the brightest SEO experts on the planet. If it was a known and obvious “black hat” violation, they wouldn’t have done it.

That’s the thing about SEO that few experts will admit: it’s often hard to identify the exact cause of a penalisation. Heck, sometimes it’s hard to tell what is and isn’t OK in SEO. What was hailed as “white hat” a few years ago is frowned on today. Read More>>